The Lessons of Watergate Do Not Belong to Us

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Forty years ago, on June 17, 1972, a very ordinary middle-class guy did his job, and he did it very well. His name was Frank Wills, and, on that night 40 years ago, he was making his rounds as a security guard at the Watergate complex, a bit of high-end real-estate hard by the Potomac in Washington, D.C. He passed by a door in the basement of the complex's parking garage and noticed that a piece of tape had been placed on the door in such a manner as to prevent the door from locking. Wills took off the tape and continued on his rounds. Upon passing the door again, Wills saw that a fresh piece of tape had been put on it. It was then that he did his job very well. Frank Wills called the cops.

Forty years ago, on June 17, 1972, three members of the D.C. metropolitan police's tactical team did their jobs, and they did them very well. Sergeant Paul Leeper, and officers John Barrett and Carl Shoffler responded to Wills's call at 1:52 a.m. It didn't sound like much. They got half-a-dozen "burglary in progress" calls every night. But when they met Wills, and saw the tape on the door, they began to work the building in earnest. It was then that they did their jobs very well. On the sixth floor, which was occupied entirely by the Democratic National Committee, they saw more tape on another door. They also found some ceiling panels missing. They drew their guns. Barrett saw some movement in a darkened office belonging to Stanley Griegg, the deputy secretary of the Democratic party. He identified himself and told whomever was there to put their hands up. Five men gradually unfolded themselves from behind desks and chairs. They surrendered peaceably, and then it all began.

Looking back now, the grand unfolding saga that we call "Watergate" looks more and more like a kind of pageant, with distinct episodes leading to a dramatic climax. The bust of the burglars. The stubborn, preposterous diligence of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, keeping the story alive when almost nobody else wanted a piece of it, in the middle of a presidential campaign on which the story would have absolutely no impact. (Go back and read their stories now. Given everything that was going on, there's absolutely no gratuitous daylight in any of their reporting. Woodward's subsequent career as a stenographer to power is baffling.) The landslide election. James McCord's letter to the implacable Judge John Sirica that spoke of "pressure" being applied from on high.

The Ervin committee hearings, a national drama in and of themselves, with characters on both sides of the bar, including Sam Ervin, who'd fought desegregation and who now fought what he saw as a greater threat to the Constitution. Old hacks like Edward Gurney of Florida and Herman Talmadge of Georgia. Rising stars like Howard Baker of Tennessee and Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, the latter thundering at a defiant John Ehrlichman that Ehrlichman's Republican party was not Weicker's own. A young minority counsel named, at that point, simply Fred Thompson, decades prior to his career as an actor and ever further removed from his brief run as a presidential candidate. And, on the other side of the table, the steady monotone of John Dean, and his golden memory, the putative fall guy turned deadly enemy. And then, the day in July of 1973, when a White House aide named Alexander Butterfield admitted to the committee the existence of the White House taping system, and the story suddenly went on afterburners.

The committee subpoenas the tapes. The White House refuses. The special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, subpoenas the tapes. The White House tries to get Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. Richardson refuses and resigns instead, as does his assistant, William Ruckelshaus. Finally, an apparatchik named Robert Bork does the deed. The country explodes in outrage. (No, really, it did.) Calls for Nixon's impeachment mount. "I am not a crook," the president memorably lies. Leon Jaworski is appointed to replace Cox. The White House releases laundered transcripts of the tapes and "Expletive Deleted" becomes a punchline. It is revealed that an 18-and-a-half minute gap exists in a crucial tape. The country finally decides it's had enough of its president. (No, really, it did.) And, at last, in the House of Representatives, a committee made up of (among other people) an eloquent black woman from Texas named Barbara Jordan, a Jesuit priest named Robert Drinan, several brave and nervous Republicans, a child of the New Jersey tenements named Peter Rodino, and a cousin of mine named Harold Donoghue, who kept dozing off on Rodino's right, brings about what the late Walter Karp would call,"the hour of the Founders, come round at last." Articles of impeachment are voted and approved. Nixon releases one last tape, the "smoking gun" conversation between him and H.R. Haldeman that cuts to ribbons almost two years of lies. Nixon resigns.

Exeunt all.

And the fans go wild. Cascades of self-congratulation!

Looking back now, how very little we came to learn from it. The purported "lessons" of Watergate lasted only a little longer than the cover-up did. The theories of exalted executive power with which Nixon justified his crimes to the nation and in his own tortured mind, and which he ably described later to David Frost as "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal," have become firmly entrenched in our government in the decades since the Watergate pageant closed and, as a self-governing citizenry, we seem to be generally fine with that. If the "lessons" of Watergate really were that "the system worked," and that "the people" triumphed, then Ronald Reagan wouldn't have survived Iran-Contra, George W. Bush wouldn't have gotten away with what his campaign did in Florida, let alone what he and Dick Cheney did once they got into office, and Barack Obama would be under more heat than he's under right now for continuing so many of the Bush-Cheney policies in the area of civil liberties, and might think more than twice about letting the drones fly under some fanciful interpretation of Article I that should have instantly melted away, if the "lessons" of Watergate had been as thoroughgoing as they were alleged to be at the time. If we truly had learned the "lessons" of Watergate, the presence of John Yoo in our government would not have been possible.

Instead, the true "lessons" of Watergate were how we could abandon our responsibilities as citizens, and twist the obligations of self-government, so that "the country" would never have to "go through" anything like that again. What was a triumph of self-government in 1974 was reckoned to be such a national trauma by 1986 that our elite institutions formed an iron circle to keep it from happening to Ronald Reagan and his people because the country "couldn't take another failed presidency." (As illustrated in On Bended Knee, Mark Hertsgaard's essential account of the lapdog press under Reagan, even Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, who'd stood all the gaff when her newspaper was alone on an island in its early Watergate coverage, was concerned that the press might go too far.) And the final absurd twist came with the impeachment of Bill Clinton for crimes against the Seventh Commandment, an exercise in Kabuki that really was only the final act in an ongoing campaign of dirty tricks. Kenneth Starr had far more in common with H.R. Haldeman than he did with Archibald Cox, and Henry Hyde had more in common with Gordon Liddy than he did with Peter Rodino. History was thereby turned on its head until its brains fell out its ears.

The lasting "lesson" of Watergate, it appears, is that self-government was too dangerous, that the perils of it outweigh its values, and that the obligations of citizenship, beyond those which are purely ceremonial, are too heavy for citizens to bear. Between now and 2014, there are going to be lots of 40-year anniversaries marking the various episodes in the grand pageant of Watergate, and all the usual suspects will deal in all the customary banalities. Good Lord willing and the creek don't rise, the blog will be around to mark them all as well, because Watergate really did mean something at the time. There was a moment, pure and fleeting, where it looked as though another way really was possible.

So this is the first of them. As it happens, life didn't turn out so well for Frank Wills. He couldn't get another job after he lost the job at the Watergate. (One university in D.C. told him it was afraid to hire him for fear it might lose its federal money. So much for the "lessons" of Watergate.) When his mother down in South Carolina suffered a stroke, Wills moved in to take care of her, and they survived on the $450-a-month she got from Social Security. When she died, Wills lost the house and was briefly homeless. He got busted for shoplifting a $12 pair of shoes in 1983. He died, penniless, on September 27, 2000. Richard Nixon, needless to say, got rich.

But, if you happen to be passing by the Mount Transfiguration Baptist Church Cemetery in Aiken County down in South Carolina, you might stop by the grave of Frank Wills and say a little prayer for his soul. This weekend is his 40-year anniversary. It belongs to him, and to the three cops — public employees, as they are reckoned in the politics of the moment — who answered his call. Forty years ago this Sunday, they all did their jobs very well. In the 40 years since, as citizens of a self-governing republic, we've all done ours very badly.